An armed militant group believed to be linked to the Daesh terrorist group took control of a city in northern Mozambique and killed several people, including at least one foreign worker, near a major gas project involving France’s Total and other energy companies, security sources said on Saturday. .
Militants first raided the town of Palma in the northern province of Cabo Delgado on Wednesday, forcing nearly 200 people, including foreign gas workers, to be evacuated from a hotel where they had sought refuge.
No one was left in the besieged Amarula Palma hotel that was attacked, a hotel worker told Agence France-Presse (AFP) by telephone.
Some people were killed, including a South African, in an ambush during an overnight rescue operation led by the military, security sources and some surviving workers said, although details were not immediately available about their numbers or nationality.
Local media reported that at least seven workers were killed during the ambush.
In a phone call late Friday, after he was evacuated to Afungi, a worker said most of the city had been destroyed and “many people are dead.”
Human Rights Watch (HRW) said witnesses had spoken of seeing “bodies on the streets and residents fleeing after … the warriors fired indiscriminately at people and buildings.”
The government has not provided an update on the attack since Thursday.
‘Government forces have withdrawn’
The militant attack on Palma, a coastal city with 75,000 inhabitants, is the closest yet to the major gas project during a three-year uprising in northern Mozambique. Gas exports from the plant are expected no earlier than 2024.
“Government forces have withdrawn from Palma so the city has been captured,” a security source said. Another source confirmed that militants had taken the city even though fighting in the area was ongoing.
Palma is located about 10 kilometers from the liquefied natural gas (LNG) project on the Afungi Peninsula on the Indian Ocean coast near the Tanzanian border.
Militants arranged the surprise and sent terrified residents to nearby forests while gas and government workers sought refuge at the hotel.
Defense Ministry spokesman Omar Saranga declined to comment, urging only people to “be calm and follow the authorities’ rescue instructions.”
About 80 people were removed from the hotel by military trucks on Friday, but some of the vehicles were ambushed, says an official from a private security company involved in the rescue operation.
“The convoy of 17 cars with people rescued from Amarula (hotel) was attacked shortly after it left. Some have been killed but many managed to escape,” the source said.
Those who remained at the hotel went to nearby military barracks by the beach and were taken out by boat to an undiscovered place, the source said.
“At first it was thought that they had been killed … They were about 100 people,” the source added.
Mobile phone communication with Palma has been disrupted since the attack began.
A South African government source told AFP in Johannesburg that one of their citizens had been killed in the violence.
‘Carefully planned’
The attack came hours after Total, the largest investor in the $ 20 billion gas project, said it was gradually resuming work after halting all construction work in January due to a large number of attacks.
Six other international companies including ExxonMobil are also present in the region.
“The scale and intensity of the attack on Palma required careful planning, suggesting that the group used calm in the fighting during the rainy season during the first months of 2021 to prepare for a concentrated high-profile attack,” said Alexander Raymakers, a senior African analyst. at the British risk-taking company Verisk Maplecroft.
In a statement on Thursday, the Defense Ministry said the group had “attacked simultaneously from three directions” including from the local airfield.
No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack.
But the latest attacks have increasingly been claimed by the so-called Central Africa Province (ISCAP) of the Daesh terrorist group.
Since October 2017, militants have looted villages and towns across northern Mozambique, causing nearly 700,000 to flee their homes.
The violence has left at least 2,600 people dead, half of them civilians, according to the US-based data collection agency Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED).
